The Story of Lucy Gault

The war that Ralph had gone to fight in impinged on Ireland’s chosen neutrality. The precautions against invasion that had already been put in hand at the army Camp near Enniseala became general throughout the country, while armies advanced in Europe and distant cities were bombed. A nightly blackout was enforced; gas masks were issued; there was instruction in the use of the stirrup pump. Familiarly known as the Emergency, the war brought shortages – of petrol, of paraffin for the lamps that still illuminated Lahardane and houses like it, of tea and coffee and cocoa, of clothes made in England. Crops that had not been cultivated before – fields of sugarbeet and tomatoes – were grown. More wood and turf were burnt. Bread was less white.

Every day Lucy walked to Kilauran to buy an Irish Times and read about what was happening. Parts of the few letters she now received from Ralph were blackly smudged out, or so cut away by the army censors that both sides of a page were deprived: for any information that was available, or permitted, she relied on reports in which death was spelt out in numbers – in the count of Spitfires that did not return, in the casualties of evacuation and retreat. And she knew that there were losses left unmentioned and uncalculated. Every Sunday evening on the wireless she had bought for the drawing-room there was the playing of the Allies’ national anthems, now and again a new one added, and that at least was cheerful.

But cheerfulness was brief. For Lucy, on the strand and in the woods, Ralph’s features were as death had arrested them, his limbs gone rigid, the sprawl of his body awkward. Someone had pressed his eyelids down over his unseeing stare, and then passed on. Dirt was thick on the uniform she had never seen.

These images haunted her until another letter came to contradict them, another brief reprieve before her fears began again. It was then, when reassurance had been too temporary a dozen times, that Bridget’s intuition became Lucy’s resolve. If Ralph returned she would go to him as soon as she heard.

4

‘Signore! Signore!’ the caretaker called up the staircase. I’l dottore …’

The Captain called back, and then there were the doctor’s footsteps on the stairs.

‘Buongiorno, signore.’

‘Buongiorno, dottor Lucca.’

The Captain made coffee while he waited. Outside, it was still freezing, the coldest winter they had known in Bellinzona for a generation, so it was said. From the window he watched people going to work, to the post-bus depot, to the clock factory to keep the machinery turning over in case it became defective through lack of use: during Switzerland’s isolation in the war years there had not been much trade in fancy clocks. The baker who had a short left leg stomped back in his lopsided manner from his night’s work, his overcoat pulled close around him. The road-clearers dug their spades into the snow.

‘If she does not wish to live,’ the doctor said in Italian, ‘she will not live.’

He said it again, less confidently, in English. The Captain understood both times. It was what dottor Lucca always said. Less than five minutes his examination had taken and the Captain wondered if, this time, the stethoscope had even been taken from his bag.

‘My wife has influenza,’ he said, speaking in Italian also.

‘Si, signore, si.’

They drank a cup of coffee together, still standing. The influenza was an epidemic now, the doctor said; hardly a house in the neighbourhood did not have a case. In the circumstances the spread of any epidemic was understandable and must be expected. The melancholy of la signora was a more pressing matter, more serious.

‘It is the truth, signore. With illness as well, to make a complication

‘I know.’

The doctor shook hands before he left. He was a humane man, who charged little for his services, who wished only that all his patients might recover from their ailments and be happy in their good health. Life, he never tired of reminding them in a sensible Swiss way, was short, even when it went on a bit.

‘Grazie, dottore. Grazie.’

‘Arrivederci, signore.’

He left behind the prescription he left for everyone. It would bring the temperature down and clear the headache. He instructed the Captain to keep his wife warm.

The hopelessness in dottor Lucca’s eyes remained with Everard Gault after the doctor had gone. He made a jug of weak tea and carried a cup of it to the bedroom. During the many years that had passed since their exile began, he and Heloise had become used to making tea in a jug, no teapot being supplied either in Italy or in Switzerland, and they had never bought one.